The Hub/USA

"The Hub originally came about as a way to clean up a mess. John Bischoff, Jim Horton and myself played for several years in a group called The League of Automatic Music Composers, the first microcomputer network band. Every time we rehearsed, a complicated set of ad-hoc connections between computers had to be made. This made for a system with rich and varied behavior, but it was prone to failure, and bringing in other players was difficult. Later we sought a way to open the process up, to make it easier for other musicians to play in the network situation. The goal was to create a new way for people to make music together.__The solution hit upon had to be easy to use and provide a standard user interface, so that players could connect almost any type of computer. The Hub is a small computer dedicated to passing messages between players. It serves as a common memory, keeping information about each player's activity that is accessible to other players' computers." (Tim Perkis)